Service Management
The Association for Community Relations (ARC) is the only organization in Romania accredited as Country Facilitator for managing the LBG model.
ARC is currently the main support organization for companies and their community partners as regards the implementation of efficient long-term community programs.
The work of the organization is structured on five basic components:
- The corporate community involvement promotion program comprises annual events, consulting and technical assistance for the development of community involvement strategies and resource mobilization mechanisms, as well as community brokering. This program has national coverage.
- The NGO fundraising capacity building program features assistance for developing a strategy and a plan to mobilize resources from community donors, testing and internalizing new fundraising mechanisms, assistance for improving partnerships with the business sector, etc. The program is addressed to the organizations interested in the fundraising practice and it has national coverage.
- The Romanian community foundation pilot program capitalizes on the experience of national programs to contribute to the development of geographically well-defined communities – e.g. Cluj-Napoca community, to mobilize resources from local donors that match community needs. So far, ARC has been the initiator of the community foundation establishment process in communities such as Cluj-Napoca, Bucuresti, Iasi, Constanta, Targu Mures and Alba Iulia.
- The pilot program aiming at community resource mobilization mechanisms was for ARC a way to adjust and test different methods and mechanisms that were new or very little used in Romania, in order to make them available to community partners: NGO’s, individual donors or companies. Some of these ARC-tested and -promoted mechanisms are: the 2% tax-on-income donation, payroll giving or the social involvement stock exchange.
- The resource mobilization research component concerns the research ARC has conducted in the last 6 years. ARC carried out quantitative and qualitative research on individual and corporate donor’s philanthropic behavior; corporate community involvement practice trends in Romania; analysis of community involvement mechanisms used by companies; the results of the provision on 2% tax donation after its first years of implementation, etc.